Description
Book SynopsisDuring the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by the proliferation of new worlds—geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by natural philosophy, or science.
Trade ReviewWonder and Science analyzes colonial reports, works of natural history and travel, and popular writings to gather details on how concepts and worlds were challenged and remade. Chapters cover some great authors and thinkers in England and France: individuals who made their marks on a changed world.
* Reviewer's Bookwatch *
Wonder and Science is a tremendously learned account of the pleasurable yet uneasy coupling of fictional and scientific discourse in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The book traces the evolution, and the interrogations, of the epistemological category of wonder in a dazzling array of scientific and quasi-scientific texts, both English and Continental.... Wonder and Science masterfully illustrates this disciplinary flux—and reflux—of the early modern era, and the book's greatest strengths lie in its sustained focus on the formal and rhetorical synthesis of scientific and nonscientific texts during the period.
-- Jessica Wolfe * Journal of Modern History *
Table of Contents1. Introduction
Part I Imagination and Discipline
2. Travel Writing and Ethnographic Pleasure: André Thevet and America, Part I
3. The Nature of Things and the Vexations of Art
Part II Alternative Worlds
4. On the Infinite Universe and the Innumerable Worlds
5. A World in the Moon: Celestial Fictions of Francis Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac
6. Outside In: Hooke, Cavendish, and the Invisible Worlds
Part III
7. Anthropometamorphosis: Manners, Customs, Fashions, and Monsters
8. "My Travels to the Other World": Aphra Behn and Surinam
9: E Pluribus Unum: Lafita's Moeurs des sauvages amériquaians and Enlightenment Ethnology
Coda: The Wild Child
